Foster care and adoption; toddlers to young adults; it's all here-- faith and humor meet as this mom of four chronicles the joy and heartbreak of motherhood.

Friday, November 11, 2011

November, 2010-- It's not infatuation

At a recent meeting with all the
players in our foster daughter’s case — social workers, attorneys, birth
parents, adoption experts and Bill and me— I was asked to give a summary of Teenaisa’s
progress since our last meeting, three months previous. I told the group all of
Teenasia’s recent successes—being promoted up a level in both gymnastics and swimming;
scoring a goal in just about every soccer game; behaving well (for the most
part) in school and at home; scoring on grade level in reading and math.
Thinking about how far Teenasia had come in the past three years, I smiled.

“You’re
really infatuated with her, aren’t you?” asked a man in the room who had made
it clear in previous meetings that he did not want Teenasia to be adopted by Bill and
me. He said it with a sly smile and clearly meant it as an insult— using the
word “infatuation” in place of “love” to suggest our feelings for T were
surface only.

I
looked at him, but did not respond. His words were so off base that they didn’t
even sting. Infatuated. Thinking
about it later, I could have responded that I wish I were infatuated with Teenasia.
Infatuation is quite a bit easier than love.

Infatuation
comes early in a relationship, before we know the person fully. During the
infatuation stage, we delight in a person’s good qualities; everything about
the person is sparkly and new. Talents are lauded as unique and remarkable,
while troublesome behaviors are dismissed as quirks and eccentricities.
Infatuation is a fun stage — it’s most delicious when you’re dating the person,
but I found the feeling of infatuation to be lovely with each my babies
(including toddler Teenasia) as well.

Love,
specifically parental love, has little in common with infatuation. Parenting
and loving Teenasia has been the most difficult endeavor Bill and I have faced as a
couple. At the same time, it’s been the most meaningful and rewarding
experience of our marriage. Many times, parenting Teenasia, I have been grateful for
my background as a distance runner. Competitive runners understand that
satisfaction and pain can exist simultaneously — that a good race does not
always mean a pleasurable race. So it is with parenting. Loving a child rarely
involves cruising along, unthinkingly. Parenting is an intentional loving
response to the needs of a child — and the more complicated the child’s needs,
the more difficult it can be to discover what the loving response must be. To
keep with the running analogy, parenting a child with complicated needs is a
race with a lot of hills.

In
our effort to parent Teenasia well—to love her most effectively, and in a way that
best brings out the Teenasia she needs to become — Bill and I have read piles of books
on children with a history of trauma. We’ve scoured the Internet for
information on children whose attachment to primary caregivers has been broken
or compromised. We’ve networked with other adoptive families and have pumped
friends who work in the foster care or adoption fields for information and
assistance. We’ve prayed.

In
doing the often-exhausting work of trying to love Teenasia as she most needs to be loved,
I have experienced along the way, a fear that borders on terror that I lack the
giddy sense of head-over-heels love for her. I recognize and appreciate her
gifts but am not charmed by them; I see her failings but cannot brush them
aside. Yet, in any given day, more than half my thoughts are about her. The
most serious conversations that Bill and I have concern the possibilities in
her future. When she shows progress, my heart leaps for joy. When she
backslides, I am flattened.

There
have been times when my fear has risen to the point that I have wished that I
could trade in the depth of feeling I have for my daughter for something
sweeter and lighter. But that is not who I am, and it’s not what she requires.
Infatuation, breezy and exhilarating as it may be, cannot last. It either
withers into nothingness and evaporates entirely, or it is replaced by love.

To
love is to respond to the needs of another. And the more we know a person, the
more we understand his or her needs — both small and profound. In just a few
cases in each lifetime, we are privileged to actually see what another human
being may need to become more fully him or herself. Just a few times in a
lifetime, another person’s survival is dependent on us being able to recognize
who that person is, in the depth of their being.

And
what is parenting but reaching into the soul of a child and pulling out the
true person who resides there?

About Me

Annemarie writes locally and nationally on foster care, adoption, parenting and spirituality. She is responsible for the content in At Home with Our Faith (circulation 80,000), which has won the First Place award in its category from the Associated Church Press for three consecutive years. Her Training Wheels column has appeared in the Milwaukee Catholic Herald since 2002 and most of these blogs appeared first in her Training Wheels column or as a chapter of her book, Discovering Motherhood (Ambassador Press, 2006). She is married to Bill, with four children (two biological, two adopted), and works in a job-share position at Johnson Controls as director of Corporate Programs in Diversity and Public Affairs.